I hope my high-school sweetheart will forgive me for revealing an intimate secret about our teenage relationship: one that makes us so retrospectively uncool that some of our classmates may regret ever having allowed us to sit at their tables in the school canteen. We never had sex.

I'm aware that this confession might make me seem like an acolyte of Nadine Dorries. In practical terms, I maintained the purity that she wanted the government to advocate, with her proposal of a bill providing special education on "the benefits of abstinence" to girls between the ages of 13 and 16. I am glad that I abstained. My teenage years were challenging and confusing enough without adding "going to Harvard" (our weird local euphemism for intercourse: "The prom king and queen? – yeah, I think they're going to Harvard") to the mix.

Dorries withdrew her bill from debate today, perhaps because she can't get enough support for it among her colleagues. And that wouldn't surprise me, because despite having been a model of teenage abstinence, even I don't support it.

In fact, while my experience makes me agree, in principle, that it's a good thing for teenagers to delay sexual activity, my experience also convinced me of the value of comprehensive sex education for all young people. Because it was comprehensive sex education that kept me from going to Harvard until some time after I finished school – not adults telling me that I must not have sex under any circumstances.

I attended a state school in a middle-class suburb of upstate New York in the mid-to-late 90s. It was a liberal enough time and place that all students were required to complete two modules in sex education, from the age of 13, unless they were granted a rare dispensation to be removed from class. It wasn't a liberal enough time and place that this was accepted without strenuous objection. Our community was also a place where Christian teenagers prayed in a circle around the flagpole in the morning before the school bell rang, and the sex ed curriculum prompted many angry meetings and parents writing furious screeds to the school newspaper and the headmaster. That the classes were co-ed seemed particularly awkward: I even made a self-righteous attempt at getting out of it myself, reckoning that I'd read enough Jackie Collins novels to know what I was doing.

I'm glad my Jackie Collins argument was declared void. Because sitting in a classroom with some 15-year-old boys while a teacher demonstrates correct condom application is far less dangerous than having sex with one of those 15-year-old boys without a condom. We were given the full gamut of information: the benefits of abstinence were detailed, but the correct use of all different kinds of contraception were also provided (sadly, the time the teacher spent explaining about sponges proved useful to no one). And because my high-school boyfriend went through precisely the same education, while our hormones raged and we discussed the question of whether we should consummate our adolescent passion (and goodness knows, we discussed it a lot), we based our decision to abstain not on a belief that sex was bad or unacceptable, but with the understanding that it was a huge responsibility with potentially serious consequences, which we did not feel mature enough to handle.

I doubt that I was in the majority among my classmates in choosing to abstain from sex. But since almost all of us received the same sex education, I'd be willing to bet that the rates of pregnancy and STDs at my school were below average: because our health educators did their best to teach us to value and understand safe sex. And we were taught to value and understand it together: co-ed sex education sent the message that everyone was responsible for making smart decisions about sexual activity – not just the girls. Most of us ended up having sex with members of the opposite sex, so it made sense that we learned about it together, too.

Which is why, to me, it's simple: educate young people about safe sex and they will be more likely to see safe sex as an option – and some, like me, will choose to wait until they feel confident that they can handle the responsibility. If you tell young girls that they must abstain from sex, they're still going to have sex – and, as demonstrated by studies that show higher rates of pregnancy among students who receive abstinence-only education – they're far less likely to do it safely. The logic is clear. Let's hope that today is the last time Nadine Dorries makes an attempt to waste parliamentary time trying to prove the opposite.